Ann Quinn——Creative Process Map How a poem happens There are many ways a poem can happen, but 21st century skills and Artist Habits of Mind are involved somehow in the creation of nearly every poem. Here I will lead you through the creation of one poem of mine, from preinception to publication. Artist Habits of Mind
21st century skills
OBSERVE In the spring of 2016 I worked very hard on my “patio” gardens. I took all the soil out of the planters and raised beds and mixed it with compost and fertilizer and water and fish emulsion and put it back in and planted flowers and vegetables and by June everything was thriving like never before. But the nasturtium seeds I had planted, though they had sprouted and put forth large green nasturtium-smelling leaves, failed to produce any blooms. I observed and wondered and read something somewhere which told me that nasturtiums do best in poor soil. They refuse to bloom if the soil is too rich. Oops. In previous years I had grown lovely nasturtiums; this year I had changed the environment and would not get blooms. So I pulled the plants out of the garden. It was a hot July day, and no way was I walking all the way back to my compost pile. I dropped the pile of leaves and stems and roots right on the asphalt driveway and went back into my air conditioned house. A week or so later, those neglected uprooted plants produced gorgeous glowing flowers, right there on the driveway. What a poetic image! But how can I use this? I go about my life. My life includes reading the New York Times. A featured article catches my eye. A young male graduate of the exclusive St. Paul School in New Hampshire is being brought to trial for the rape of an underage teen. The boy is Harvard-bound, good-looking, privileged. The girls remains unnamed and anonymous. This case speaks to me: a young
girl’s bravery in taking someone with every advantage to trial when it would have been so very easy to settle out of court, collect a large sum of money, and chalk it all up to youthful indiscretion. I want to write about it, but I don’t know how. ENVISION
Critical Thinking, Creativity
How can I write a poem that will convey my admiration and empathy with this girl while linking it to the universal—for so very many women and girls have gone through something like this (and this was prior to the Me Too movement). And how can I write about this without clobbering the reader over the head with my opinions? UNDERSTAND ART WORLD
DEVELOP CRAFT
As a poet, I read and think deeply about the work of other poets. Some of my favorite poems use an image as a metaphor for something entirely different. One such poem is Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead.” He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down. In a poem like this, the title doesn’t seem to relate to the content of the poem, so the careful reader wants to stay with the poem, re-reading it and thinking about its relation to the title, yielding a much richer and more memorable experience than an ordinary description of grief.
I thought for many days about how to express my feelings about the St. Paul rape trial in a poem, but I also had to not think about it. Because ordinary thinking would lead me to journalism, or perhaps to a personal essay, but not to a poem. EXPRESS I don’t remember the exact moment when I connected the two events— the nasturtiums and the trial. But when it happened, it was very clear. I wrote out a very short prose poem: To the brave girl testifying about her assault at St. Paul’s I finally pulled the nasturtiums out of the too rich soil in the planter. It was mid-July, leaves the size of coasters but no blooms. I tossed the uprooted plants on the driveway, too hot to walk them all the way to the compost. Days forgotten, from that heap on the asphalt one morning glowed three orange jewels. With no apologies. STRETCH AND EXPLORE I had to fool with it a bit. I decided to try syllabics, which to me at the time meant forcing the words of the poems into lines of ten syllables each. It didn’t work very well, but that’s how I sent it to the poetry mentor with whom I was working at the time. Mid-July, I finally pulled the nasturtiums out of the too rich soil in the planter. Leaves the size of coasters but no blooms. I tossed the uprooted plants on the driveway, too hot to walk them all the way to the compost. Days forgotten, from that heap on the asphalt one morning glowed three orange jewels. With no apologies. REFLECT
Communication
He liked the language of the poem very much, but immediately saw what I was trying to do with the syllabics, and nixed the idea, suggesting two other ways I might create more natural line breaks. Mid-July, I finally pulled the nasturtiums out of the too rich soil in the planter. Leaves the size of coasters but no blooms. I tossed the uprooted plants on the driveway, too hot to walk them all the way to the compost. Days forgotten, from that heap on the asphalt one morning glowed three orange jewels. With no apologies.
or
Mid-July, I finally pulled the nasturtiums out of the too rich soil in the planter. Leaves the size of coasters but no blooms. I tossed the uprooted plants on the driveway, too hot to walk them all the way to the compost. Days forgotten, from that heap on the asphalt one morning glowed three orange jewels. With no apologies. ENGAGE AND PERSIST
I was thrilled that he got what I was trying to do, and had no attachment to my syllabics idea. I fooled around with the line breaks until I had a version in which I thought the word at the end of each line conveyed how a violated woman would feel—soil, tossed, hot, compost, heap—with a turn at the end (called a “volta” in poetry) to jewels.
Collaborate I was pretty happy with my poem but still wanted some other readers before I sent it out. I had recently joined a poetry workshopping group and this was the first poem I brought. The other members agreed that I could take out the modifiers: “brave” from the title, and “with no apologies” at the end. I had been wondering if these were necessary, so was glad to get the opinion that they were not needed, that the image could stand on its own. Here is the finished poem (and please note that it is rare for me for a final draft to have language so nearly identical to the first draft): To the girl testifying about her assault at St. Paul’s I finally pulled the nasturtiums out of the too rich soil in the planter. It was mid-July, leaves the size of coasters but no blooms. I tossed the uprooted plants on the driveway, too hot to walk them all the way to the compost. Days forgotten, from that heap on the asphalt one morning glowed three orange jewels. Now, to send it out. The average decent literary journal accepts less than 5% of its submissions, so poets send their work out to many journals at a time, to increase the odds of acceptance. It’s a very time consuming process for both the poet and the editors. I wanted this poem to get into the right hands. I subscribe to a service that alert writers of opportunities,
and I received notice of an anthology being put together by Sable Books of poems on the global epidemic of violence against women. I sent the poem. A month or so later it was accepted, and some months after that the book was published.
